Iphone 3gs: transferring contacts from old phone without iTunes or Windows

After using a Nokia E61i for a very long time, I have moved on to an Iphone 3gs.

Since I picked up the phone from USA, it was locked to a US carrier.

FIRST CHALLENGE: unlock it to use it on Vodafone in India.
My phone had Base Band 5.14.x and therefore it was not unlockable....till Apple realease iOS 4.2.1 and till @sherif_hashim & @MuscleNerd released Redsn0w 0.9.6b5. see this http://bit.ly/eVAaVa

NEXT CHALLENGE : I had to transfer all my contacts from Nokia E61i to iPhone.

While this may sound very easy to most, I wanted to do this without having to boot into windows.  I use Ubuntu so I donot have iTunes or Outlook that I can sync my iPhone directly to.

Surprisingly, this was far easier than I had thought.

1. I copied all contacts on E61i onto a microsUSB card inside the phone. In Addressbook, Mark All contacts and then copy them to the card. All options are there in the addressbook menu.
2. Connected the phone to the computer using a connector cable (that came along with the Nokia phone). On connection, phone asked to choose one of the two modes - sync or data transfer. I chose Data Tansfer mode on the phone. Now the microusb card was be accessible on the computer.
3. Searched for contacts folder on the card. It had a large number of vcfs (one for every contact. Copied the same to my laptop. Remeber, I am on Ubuntu, so collated all the vcfs together using the command
   

   cat *.vcf > all_in_one.vcf

   Now I had one vcf file that had all my contacts
   
4. Now I logged into my gmail account on the web >> contacts >> Chose Import from file and pointed it to the all_in_one.vcf file. It copied all contacts to my gmail account
5. I setup my gmail account on iPhone via Exchange option. Followed the steps here. http://bit.ly/gDM2Xw 
6. When I synced my mail account on iPhone, all contacts were transferred to my iPhone.

Going forward this will also ensure that all contacts on my phone are regularly backed up on my google account.

Pimping down Firefox : Getting more real estate

I have been using Firefox for a long time. When I tried Google Chrome for the first time, what I found most impressive was the overall real estate that I got. Not only did it offer more space, its also made it look simple because its clutter free. Therefore I decided that I will used Google Chrome going forward. But habbits are difficult to change. Somehow I found myself using Firefox most of the time.

Therefore I decided to 'Pimp down' my Firefox.

Here is what I found effective for myself:

a. Reduce the size of Icons: Right-click on the buttons in navigation toolbar, choose ‘customize’ and check ‘Use Small Icons’ at the bottom.

b. Hide title bar: This is really not required. I used the add on Hide Caption Titlebar Plus (Smart) by DarthMadara. Get it here

c. Hide menu bar: Replace the standard menu bar with a tiny menu popup using Tiny Menu 2.0.2 by Anthony Lieuallen.

Now I have a lot more real estate to play with on my Firefox window.

Sources that I found useful for this:
a. http://bit.ly/9hoM7t
b. http://bit.ly/ctt5sO
c. http://bit.ly/9eADgo